Third outtake and third part of the Hillingdon Mind interview
Again and again, thanks to Chris Phillips, here is a teaser to the third part of the hillingdonmind.org.uk interview with John done in October. The third part of the interview is up on the following page, together with handwritten lyrics of Ah Yom, the second bonus track which will be released on the Japanese version of The Empyrean. Tilt your heads, zoom as much as you can…and you will see one of the lines that was inscribed into the Curtains vinyl: A million ways things could be [Update: here it is, transcribed]
Below the teaser, you will find an outtake from the interview given exclusively to Invisible Movement, directly continuing onto the third part of the interview.
“In your daily life, if you have a thought that’s motivated through insecurity or fear, (or in a lot of cases garbage that your brain is manufacturing, that you find yourself caught up in)- it’s the nature of our minds that once a thought arises, for that thought to become another and another, with our days going by with these trains of thought. These trains end up being interrupted by something circumstantial: You run into a person and start a new conversation and the thoughts go away for a second, or you sit in-front of a tv screen and that blocks the thoughts out. But, in your daily life you’re usually consumed by these thoughts when there’s no distractions. A lot of the time you’re worried about whether this or that is gonna happen, or is this person mad at me, or am I not handsome enough, or am I not sexy enough or whatever it is. These kind of thoughts end up producing these really vast trains our brains are inescapable from, because the whole thing is being led by the emotions. The thoughts and emotions are tied to one another.
With meditation a lot of people have this misconception that the purpose is not to think anything, but to me the most valuable part of it is to establish a type of detachment from your thoughts, in which your emotions and thoughts are cut off from one another. The purpose when you’re sitting down with a technique like Vipassana is to observe your thoughts and to not get involved in them. Let them move by like they’re a cloud.”
After discussing meditation with John, Chris Phillips asked if the title Inside of Emptiness had any relation to meditation, in the sense of emptiness being a positive thing. And the below was John’s response.
“I had never meditated yet at that time. I had read about it in Aleister Crowley books and I had friends that did it. I’m sure it does have a relationship to the meaning that you’re talking about. In my lyrics and everything I was doing with words at that time, and pretty much since I started writing the lyrics of the stuff on my first solo album; I was really thinking in terms of trying to play games with words, to find words where the meanings had some sort of conflict with one another but that conflict found some sort of harmony in the context of lyrics or titles. It’s that same reconciliation of differences that I was saying takes place with the numbers that music can be analysed by. It’s the same thing with lyrics- you could have nothing but contradictory statements in the lyrics of the song and because they’re in the musical context, because they have the poetic relationship to one another (the rhyming relationship and the metric relationship to one another), they seem to convey one idea even though they’re two contradictory ideas. I was always trying to explore that and try to find things like that. And so the ‘Inside of Emptiness’ was an idea that sounded good in my brain because of its contradictory nature. It’s not contradictory if you open yourself up to the idea even though to imagine the inside of emptiness is something that our brains can’t really realise. That’s why the words sound good to me- they sort of open up an idea in me. Trying to grasp the ungraspable. Thats what I was looking for in my lyrics. It’s only been in the last 2 years that I’ve introduced a new challenge to myself within the lyric writing department beyond that, because I have other things I want to convey and had to do with reading a lot about those specific things, and so my lyrics are still doing the same thing and also doing something different, but I can’t really talk about it.”
If you liked this, check out the whole series:
Outtake 1
Interview teaser 1
Interview teaser 2
Outtake 2
